Stock shots from the archive: Part 1
This is the first of a new series that will run through to the end of the year. Each week, I'll be posting a picture or two drawn from the 91Èȱ¬ News archive.
As you can imagine, the 91Èȱ¬ has a vast archive of photographs dating back to the early days of broadcasting. Running in parallel to this is another collection that began life in the late 60s and was created to provide still images to illustrate news stories on television when there were no moving pictures.
Many of these were stock images of locations around the world, political leaders and a wide variety of subjects. To ensure the collection was kept up to date, a team of 91Èȱ¬ photographers and freelancers would continually shoot images to fill the gaps in the collection or just to refresh old images.
The point of this is that these pictures were all shot in colour - on 35mm colour transparency to be exact - at a time when most people were shooting in black and white.
The pictures are all simply framed, and some have started to lose their colour, but buried in the collection are some fascinating photos.
The first set of pictures I have chosen and shown here is filed in the basement at Television Centre under the heading: Motors/Factories/BLMC/Longbridge
The card index relating to these pictures provides a few further details, simply stating that they show the production line or exteriors of the factory at Longbridge, and were taken in July 1970. The photographer is not named.
The factory at Longbridge has of course been in the news recently, and you can .
The news archive contains many shots like this depicting a wide range of manufacturing industries, pictures that were often used as a backing for various graphics with facts and figures overlaid.
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